This paper aims to examine the subversive humor and the carnival laughter in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. From a social and cultural perspective, humor has the possible potential as a survival response to oppressive social situations. From a psychoanalytic approach, it is a means of obtaining the anal pleasures in spite of the distressing affects. Freud's anal pleasures figure prominently in Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque that celebrates the corporeal dimension of the humor. From a historical dimension, it has been conceived as a reminder of the carnal part of our existence that has been repressed through society's progressive development. These components of humor can be connected to lesbian feminist wit as a bodily eruption and an unconscious subversive force.
As a lesbian feminist humor, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit uses humor and comic parody as a politically subversive weapon while juxtaposing the Bible with this autobiography and parodying it with humor. This can be understood to challenge the authority of the Bible and tolerable heterosexuality that are combined with violence, prohibitions, and limitations. Humor aims at women stereotypes, restrictive rules of conduct, and the male monopoly. Winterson's mother, Louie, is a stereotype woman who has blind faith in the authorities that leads to humorous situations. Furthermore, Winterson's tendency towards 'the exotic' brings her many problems in school, which forces students to receive the same knowledge and ideology ignoring each student's creativity. Branding such a school as a breeding ground, Winterson can overcome these situations with subversive humor.
Subversive humor generates subversive laughter. According to Bakhtin, such subversiveness derives from a demon not God, and women are essentially related to the material, bodily lower stratum. Thus, lesbian feminist humor makes carnival laughter -- goblin laughter and defiant laughter -- dragging the serious and the abstract into the material, bodily lower stratum. The carnival laughter thus appears to triumph over lesbian desire set against the backdrop of tolerable heterosexuality, and the unconscious triumphs over the conscious in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.